Old letter from my great grandmother, signed Heil Hitler

Open the history,.;'/////https://www.highrevenuenetwork.com/rf1dj1x06?key=0aa16a7c0f0000b2fe614084b07ab273
 The screws were slowly tightened on the population in Germany in terms of what the Nazis asked for and then expected and later demanded from them. This totally would not have been necessary in the early 1930's. Then it became optional and then mandatory. Similar rules that demanded increasingly strict obedience also applied to all telephone calls, meetings and formal/informal greetings, etc.

By 1944, anyone who did not end a letter with Heil Hitler was subject to arrest. By then, this was not only no longer a negotiable issue, it could not have even been discussed or debated publicly. Varying degrees of disloyalty by the end were met with immediate arrest and potential executionI don't speak German but the whole nazi regime was centered around Hitler as a fugure head and saying "heil Hitler" was all but mandatory because not doing it suggested subversion - which meant a first class ticket to being disappeared by the Gestapo.

And all official military communications said heil Hitler. Once the code breakers at Bletchley park realised that it let they figure out how to crack the rest of the encryptionThat's an urban myth. The early Enigma machines were cryptographically flawed, but the whole point of the system from the start was that substitute letter pairs were pseudo-randomized so it would be impossible to decode a message even if you knew the last two words were "Heil Hitler!". You could write "Heil Hitler!" ten times in a row in the same message and it would be different (almost) every time so you couldn't reverse decipher the message.Furthermore, it was Polish cryptoanalysts (not the British at Bletchley Park contrary to popular belief) who noticed (in 1932!!) patterns between pairs of non-adjacent pairs of letters at the start of messages and deduced that these described the cryptographic settings for the rest of the message.

Later, during the Second World War Bletchley Park played a crucial role in deciphering large numbers of Enigma transmissions (thanks in no small part to dozens of female cryptographers, Alan Turing's computers and, last but not least, the capture of two Enigma machines from German U-boats), but the Polish were first to start unravelling the principle behind the Enigma system.

p.s. If anyone's wondering, I'm not Polish, I'm actually British, I just like to see credit given where credit is actually due.There is a bit of truth to it in that even with Enigma encryptions if you have knowledge of what the plaintext says you can limit the number of possibilities to check which makes decryption faster.

The team at Bletchley were extremely fond of a particular unfortunate German signalman who was posted somewhere out in the middle of nowhere (I think in North Africa?), because almost every day he sent a message reading "[DATE] [LOCATION] Nothing to report. Heil Hitler." which gave them a big head start on figuring out the day codes. Encrypted weather reports were also very useful for the same reasonOne of the more clear-headed comments here. OP's great grandmother was, as you said, obviously searching for someone who probably got lost during the chaotic late stages of WW2 (likely a close friend or relative, since she also knew and included their full date and place of birth, besides their former address). The city of Mannheim was pretty much completely destroyed when this letter was written, so naturally she wanted to enquire about Mr Werle, and decided to contact the police after she hadn't heard from him.

The letter also includes some interesting features of written German you don't really see anymore.

First, there's of course the great grandmother's beautiful cursive, though it's not Sütterlin or Kurrentschrift, which some people in the comments have asked about. Kurrent already wasn't 'officially' in use anymore / forbidden since 1941. This right here looks more like Normalschrift, which was the Latin handwriting script the Nazis preferred for some reason (which later evolved into the more simplified Lateinische Ausgangsschrift, the type of cursive which is still taught in German schools today).

Second, the symbol for Pfennig, ₰. My grandmother would still use this until the introduction of the euro in 2002. Same with other symbols that have disappeared over time, like the pound symbol (not the British pound, but the unit of weight, i.e. 500 g).

The third feature is the abbreviation 'Obering.', which is not the person's surname, but which stands for 'Oberingenieur' (senior engineer). It's a type of post-nominal, denoting someone's professional qualification, academic degree, or honorary title (think 'John Smith, Esq.', or 'Jane Smith, M.Sc.', as an equivalent in the English-speaking world). Most younger Germans don't really display their titles anymore, not even in academics. When phone books were still a thing however, you would often see entries like 'Max Mustermann, Dipl.-Ing.', or 'Erika Mustermann, OStR'